June 27, 2010

Meredith Blankinship & Deborah Poe

Sunday, June 277:30 pm

Concordia Coffee House2909 NE Alberta

$5.00 suggested donation

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as several chapbooks. Work is forthcoming or has appeared recently in Colorado Review, Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Journal and Denver Quarterly. Deborah is assistant professor of English at Pace University and fiction editor of the online journal Drunken Boat. You can read more at deborahpoe.com.

Meredith Blankinship is a recent transplant to Portland from the east coast and is the author of two self-published chapbooks: an origami noose and White Subaru Night. Her work has appeared in elimae and is forthcoming in Peaches & Bats. She is currently working on a project about ghost bikes around Portland.

Calcium (Ca)

20

for Cooper, this is the baby one, as an essential constituent

leaves, bones, teeth, and shells. all like mortar.

in the cenote, we dive deep into our abstractionand she drags behind her stalagmites and stalactiteswhich contain calcium carbonate along with a baby.

the baby is eating stars. the stars are yellow like lemons.they taste like lemonade and move down cold.

when the night cool blows in [at the cave's mouth where we emerge],the baby soars.

Deborah Poe

Keystone

Windows open and lovers coming through and you are a small, unrelenting object in the corner of my screen.

It starts to rain. You and the rain are thick as thieves. You are drunk and have to go teach a class in fifteen minutes. Something from my dream crackling on speakerphone. The porch light swings limning waylaid beer cans and algal blooms. This poem right now does no amount of ending. Explain it slow and lovely to me.

You have the very best of dreams. They are always long and nearly everyone makes an appearance. You translate so well and my moral compass never recovers from a squash of sleep.

Sometimes bleaching the bathroom I feel that lonely deep in my metatarsals and can't resist Googling your name one last time rather than squirming out the window and into the rain. On top of everything I'm trying to finish this book by Friday and I worry my address is, in the end, not a true place. I woke you up laughing in my sleep once and by morning remembered only deaths I'd dreamed.

It's like everything that happens is happening really small. A white Subaru gumming the pavement in its relentless tacking. You see it unstoppably from very far away.